Vehicle operators tend to spend a significant amount of time in their respective vehicles particularly when commuting from a home to a workplace, running errands, conducting business, vacationing, or for many other reasons. This time is significant enough that some vehicles come equipped with a variety of consumer electronics such as compact disc (CD) players, cassette tape players, radios, satellite radios, electronic gaming, and digital video disc (DVD) players. Some owners may also choose to equip their vehicle with aftermarket consumer electronics in the event their vehicles lack such consumer electronics or for purposes of customization. These and other entertainment or infotainment electronic devices provide a passenger in the vehicle with time-occupying options and may improve the passenger's quality of time.
Consumer electronics such as CD players, cassette tape players, DVD players, and electronic gaming generally have related media content for playback residing on a localized storage medium. For example, many on-board navigation systems utilize geographic information stored on CD's. This information may be downloaded to a memory associated with the navigation system, located in the vehicle, or directly accessed from the CD by the navigation system. In another example, DVD players commonly play media that is stored on DVD.
Consumer electronics such as radios, satellite radios, and cellular phones generally have related media content transmitted in real-time. For example, satellite radios receive audio broadcasts carried in a selected frequency band and play such broadcasts when the satellite radio is activated. In general, these forms of consumer electronics use transmission methods that may have limited types of transmitted media and reception modes.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system for wireless broadcast of relatively large and multiple types of multimedia data to vehicles. In addition, it is desirable to provide a multimedia system for a vehicle that is capable of receiving large multimedia data during intermittent operation of the vehicle. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.